Investigate Radon Pollution in Your Homes and Schools

“If a student is exposed, even at the EPA’s action level of 4 picocuries per liter, that’s equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes per day.”(1)

 

In March of 2012, USA Today published a great article about radon in schools.(2) The author, Jeff Rossen, found some astonishing facts:

  • “Most schools in the U.S. don’t test for radon. With more than 70,000 classrooms at risk across the country, just five states — Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, Florida and Colorado — require radon testing.”

  • Efforts to identify high-risk schools meet resistance: NBC News reached out to 40 different school districts across the country to offer free radon testing; all 40 either declined or didn’t respond. Rossen says that one Indianapolis district said, “This can only make us look bad. If the levels are high, parents will get upset and want every school tested.”

  • Harmful levels of radioactive radon gas — which is invisible, odorless and tasteless — exists in many classrooms across the country.  And many of these reach levels nearly twice the Environmental Protection Agency’s acceptable limit.  “If a student is exposed, even at the EPA’s action level of 4 picocuries per liter, that’s equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes per day,” radon expert Bill Field told Rossen. (Note: a picocurie is a trillionth of a curie, which is a unit of radioactivity.)

Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States after smoking and poses a serious public health problem. The National Academy of Science estimated that radon causes about 20,000 lung cancer deaths each year. The report found that even very small exposures to radon can result in lung cancer and concluded that there is no evidence of a threshold small enough to forego harm.  The report also concluded that because of a synergistic relationship between radon and cigarette smoking, many smokers who would not have developed lung cancer will develop it if exposed to radon.(3)

Students are not the only folks at risk.   Since radon tends to be more present when a building is built into a hillside, any employee who has an office in the area next to the earth is at higher risk than those employees who have offices on the second or third floor.  It is not uncommon for employees in security or building-and-grounds departments to be assigned to these windowless offices and the significantly higher risk that accompanies them.  Compared to personnel with offices on higher floors, and to teachers, who spend little time in an assigned office, their risk from radon is much greater.

View this interactive map to compare levels of radon among states, identify your own state’s vulnerability, find a county within your state, or even locate your school or home.  Alternatively, this national map provides an overview of areas in the US most likely to have elevated levels of radon.

Radon is an odorless, colorless gas that is undetectable to the eyes or the nose. It can enter a building through its water supply, through cracks in its foundation, and through doors and windows. It can also build up inside the spaces in walls and then seep out into living areas.(4)

The only way to know if you have radon in your home or school is through proper testing, which can be done with a commercial test kit. The latter can be purchased for between $20.00 and $1,000.00, reflecting a wide range of technologies and sophistication.  Two considerations may help inform your purchase:  lower-cost tools sometimes entail additional payments to process samples; and bulk testing–e.g., 10 or more homes–is best accomplished with slightly more advanced units (e.g., $200.00).  You can research the one you want by googling “Radon Detection tools”.

If you prefer not to make a purchase, borrow a detection tool from us.

Any concerned citizen can become a Pollution Detective.

(1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/radon-in-schools-many-cla_n_1314025.html
(2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/radon-in-schools-many-cla_n_1314025.html
(3) Radon, Especially in Combination With Smoking, Contributes to Lung Cancer Deaths | National Academies
(4) “EPA Assessment of Risks from Radon in Homes PDF”(PDF, 99 pp, 1.3MB,About PDF) [EPA 402-R-03-003], June 2003